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Somehow CES gets larger every year. It has now grown way beyond consumer electronics, into nearly every corner of high-tech. After six days at press events and the show itself, here are some of our favorite highlights.

Thanks in large part to the Raspberry Pi, mini PCs are all the rage. In terms of power, none of them quite compare to, for example, a standard gaming rig, but they’re slowly creeping toward that end. If some leaked slides are to be believed, then Intel’s next NUC is creeping much faster than the competition.

Will 2014 be the year of the Chromebook/box? Very possibly, if Samsung, LG, Acer, and now Asus, have anything to do with it. The Asus Chromebox is a very small fanless, headless box that will go on sale in March for just $180 — half the price of the (ever so slightly smaller) Intel NUC.

Since SteamOS was first released in December 2013, Valve has been quick to squash bugs and add much-needed functionality. It still isn’t clear when Valve will launch the final version of SteamOS (hopefully later this year), but it took a big step forward recently by releasing an ISO version that includes an easy-to-use Windows installer and dual-boot functionality. SteamOS also recently gained support for AMD and Intel GPUs.

After a protracted battle that lasted seven years and resulted in what can best be described as a dull stalemate, a new act in the Console War has finally begun with the release of the PlayStation 4 and Xbox One.

As you probably know by now, the PS4 is essentially a $400 PC. It has an x86 PC CPU, a standard PC GPU, and the same kind of RAM that you’d find on a PC graphics card. There are a few custom chips on the PS4’s motherboard, but for the most part it’s just a normal PC with some custom software. This led me to wonder… could you actually build a comparable PC for $400? More importantly, given how Sony has crippled the PS4’s home theatre functionality, is it possible to build a PC for $400 that is actually better for games and as a living room media box?

The PlayStation 4, which is released today, is an odd proposition. On the one hand, it only costs $400 — but on the other, you really don’t get a whole lot for your money. The launch games for the PS4 are a mixed bag and really not strong enough to justify the $400 price tag. What really irks me, however, is that Sony went so far with the “pure gaming machine” thing that it removed some very useful, non-gaming features, such as local and LAN media playback. With the PS4, you basically have the choice of playing games, downloading content from PSN, or streaming content from Netflix or Hulu — and that’s it.

If you’re thinking about upgrading to Windows 8, don’t be afraid to perform an in-place upgrade. A clean install isn’t your only option, as long as you’re coming from Windows 7 and don’t need to change from 32-bit to 64-bit.